Copying Is Not Theft? How About Identity Theft?

Part I of II

The above YouTube video is probably the cleverest, catchiest, and most cogent argument in favor of eliminating I.P. laws I’ve ever seen. As a piece of advertising for a concept it’s hard to top. Bravo!

Now I will destroy it.

The argument of “Copying is Not Theft” is that by copying a novel, a song, a movie, the owner is still in possession of the original and therefore by making a copy nobody is doing anything to deprive the owner of the original of anything of value.

Clever. Very clever.

But wrong. Very wrong.

Remember the scene in the movie The Net where Sandra Bullock’s character, Angela Bennett, arrives home to find her house empty and a real-estate agent selling it? The real-estate agent has a copy of the deed to the house with a copy of Angela’s signature on it. Hey, those are just copies — Angela still has the originals … somewhere. She wasn’t deprived of anything by the act of making copies, was she?

Let’s say you graduate from medical school and get a diploma, with additional certifications so that you’re entitled to put “MD, FACS” after your name. Now, anyone copying those diplomas and certifications hasn’t deprived you of anything if they perform surgery in your name and a few patients die in the O.R. right?

Or for my last example — and you gotta love this one — you’re a scientist working at a lab that stores various viruses — weaponized anthrax, as an example — that if released could kill millions of people. Hey, you still have all your original security passes, ID’s, and clearances if someone clones your biometric data and uses it to go grab some anthrax and drop it into the Lake Mead reservoir, right?

Come on, Neil, now you’re just being arch, argumentative, and ridiculous. Get to the point — copying a book, or a song, or a movie.

I never left the point. It’s exactly the same subject.

I spend five years of my life writing a novel — go through eight drafts before I finally have it right. That’s a major investment of blood, sweat, toil, and tears.

I put it up for sale on my website as a PDF file, or on Amazon.com as a Kindle file, or get it accepted for sale through iTunes for reading on the Apple iPad.

The next thing I know, all these versions of my novel are free Torrent downloads for which I don’t get anything in return.

Oh, Neil, you still have your original. Copying Is Not Theft. By making a copy I haven’t deprived you of anything.

Except, why should anyone making a rational economic calculation pay me for something they can get for free? So people get the benefits of my five years of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, and my checking account doesn’t have money in it to pay for doctor’s visits and prescriptions needed to treat my Type-II Diabetes.

Or, I spend four years of my life and a half million bucks of my family’s dough — including fourteen cuts in an editing bay — making a movie. Then I put it up for sale on Amazon.com as a Video on Demand. Someone with software to get by any copy protection Amazon.com has takes my movie and presses it into DVD’s for sale in kiosks in Hong Kong … and, once again, as a Torrent.

Now before I even get the chance to sell my movie for commercial distribution — which might get me back the cash, talent, and time invested in making this movie so I can afford to make another one — people are getting the benefit of my blood, sweat, toil, tears, and cash … and I am prevented from self-financing my next movie.

If I invent, compose, or craft something original, it’s part of me. It’s part of my identity.

The basic libertarian principle of liberty starts with self-ownership. Preventing me from owning the sole right to offer copies of things that are part and parcel of my personal identity — preventing me from owning the exclusive right to make copies of what I make as part of my personal identity — is the destruction of my life and liberty … and quite literally could end up killing me.

Think about it. Please. None of this is theoretical for me. This is how I make my living. This is how I survive … or not.

Postscript:

I’m going to publish this general statement both here and on Part II:

The questions of how copyrights, trademarks, and patents are currently defined and enforced by States are an entirely separate issue from the arguments I have been making since the 1980’s about property rights in identity and information objects.

For now I would be entirely satisfied if libertarians and anarchists recognized my property rights in the things I create and respected my right to license copies, using no other enforcement mechanism than social preferencing.

If we ever get there, I would only sign a General Submission to Arbitration with an arbiter whose legal code recognized my property rights in name, brand, identity, and information objects I create.

But if libertarian/anti-statist writers and organizations continue to deny property rights in Identity and Personal Brand — both violated by unlicensed copying of created works — the libertarian movement fails to be an effective defender of the right to self ownership — the center of all libertarian thought — and belongs in the dustbin of history along with all other failed forms of socialism that treat the individual as a slave to the wants and needs of their brothers.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Libertarian Ideals from the 2011 Anthem Film Festival! My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available free on the web linked from the official movie website. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!

As you know, I don’t find your position convincing. Right at the moment, though, I’m not sure how interested I am in debating the actual issue of IP with you. It seems like a more positive discussion would revolve around how to best monetize what you have done under the circumstances you describe.

Nobody can take away from you the reputational benefits of the magnificient accomplishment of having written Alongside Night. You’ve made a plausible claim to having co-created agorism along with Konkin and he’s not around to contradict you. Within the libertarian movement, the star of agorism is ascendant. You are poised to realize profts, it would seem, regardless of IP. You recently wondered about people hanging out a shingle as arbitrators. I don’t know that the market demand for specifically agorist arbitration professionals just yet is all that large, but it seems likely that time will come. Of course, that eventuality doesn’t address your current needs. I don’t know. It just seems to me as if there ought to be ways to profit from your fame, with or without IP.

Neil, I bought “Alongside Night” and “The Rainbow Cadenza” at a used book store. You didn’t get a dime from the sale. I theoretically could borrow them from a local library. How are these different than grabbing a .PDF from the Pirate Bay?

I partially, respectfully disagree. Copying information is not the same act as theft of a physical thing. It sometimes has similar effects, but not always.

First, the facts: The cost of copying information has dropped to near zero. It won’t rise ever again.

What are the implications of free information duplication? Not all copying results in lost wages for the author. Some of it results in increased income; surely you agree as you’ve been re-publishing your books here. Time shifting of performances and media shifting of text/audio/video by an individual clearly involve the duplication of information. And not every person that downloads a song illegally would have purchased the song otherwise.

On the other hand, the duplication non-costs for information can help the author. The cost of duplication and delivery is very low and not every author/artist needs a publisher/label. How do we, as writers and artists, come to terms with the fact that DRM frequently makes the experience much worse for our lawful audience than it is for “pirates”? For non-technical folk, the restrictions are often baffling. This creates an even stronger economic incentive to copy against an author’s wishes, not a lesser one. And ultimately, all DRM schemes fail at some level.

As authors/artists what we really want is for people to respect the license under which we distribute our works. Whether a book with a traditional copyright or software like Linux under a “copyleft” license, we really just want our terms to be respected. Breaching those artist-dictated terms is the problem we lament.

As free-marketeers, we need to find ways to come to terms with these difficult facts, turn a tidy profit, and not resort to coercive copyright-enforcement regimes to redress our grievences against our own prospective customers. This is a long, hard growing-up process that many industries (movie, music, book, news, software) face together. We haven’t and won’t sort it out overnight. I don’t think it’ll be as cut-and-dried as “this is stealing” or not.

Personally, I’ve purchased three of your books and I’d love to watch Lady Magdalene’s, but Amazon’s DRM is too much for my taste. I want to control media that I have purchased and own, just as I do with your books.

In the beginning of your piece, you claim, “The argument of ‘Copying is Not Theft’ is that by copying a novel, a song, a movie, the owner is still in possession of the original and therefore by making a copy nobody is doing anything to deprive the owner of the original of anything of value.” I disagree — I think that the real argument of the video is, “Copying and stealing are two distinct and separate actions.” It’s not impossible that the two actions could have similar consequences in specific circumstances, but that does not change the fact that copying and stealing are different.

You say that, “I spend five years of my life writing a novel — go through eight drafts before I finally have it right. That’s a major investment of blood, sweat, toil, and tears… The next thing I know, all these versions of my novel are free Torrent downloads for which I don’t get anything in return.” I agree that that’s very bad thing! Those people have done something that you explicitly told them not to do, and their actions harmed you economically.

Quite reasonably, you tell people not to copy your book and buy it from you instead. Under this approach, yes, copying has an almost identical to stealing, as you pointed out. However, if you employed a different sale model — for example, the ransom model (widely popularized by Kickstarter) — then you might expect all your money up front, before you released (or possibly even wrote) your book. After that, people can make as many copies as they like, and you suffer no economic difficulty at all! In this system, copying is utterly divorced from theft.

Just because copying and theft have similar consequences under your preferred method of sale does not mean that they are the same. When public opinion (or at least the news media) fails to differentiate between copying and theft, it hurts the public’s ability to understand the possibility of alternate sale models, like the ransom model. Thus, I think it is tremendously important that people hear and understand the message that copying is not theft.

I can’t even think of people who does these things. I mean seriously, identity theft is one of the most rotten things to do and not even a new set of ed hardy perfume can take away the smell of stealing somebody’s personality. Imagine if someone took your identity and used it to hurt another person… wouldn’t that be sick to the core?

Copying and trying to sell it is wrong. Downloading it and previewing it to find out it’s garbage and deleting it before wasting your money on it is a life saver. 95% of the movies and music today is shear garbage not even worth wasting hard drive space on let alone copying. If it is good you take a chick out to the movies to see it and get some instead of taking her to a piece of trash and having to hear her complain all the way through it and all the way home until you throw her out of your Maxima. If you make something good people will pay to go see it on the big screen and buy a high definition copy with the extras for their media collection. Nobody wants to look like a loser playing 700k avi rips on their 60″ seeing the afros walking in front of the camera and the retarded screening whenever something halfway funny happens. There’s enough NAZI laws already and they never work. Just look at history. Ban guns and only the thugs that don’t follow laws will have them. The home invaders are praying they ban guns just like Australia where home invasions went up 700% in the first year after the ban. Luckily the entire system is going belly up being actually 70 trillion in debt so don’t expect any miraculous government bailout or grand assistance when the bubble pops. Sooner or later the rest of the world won’t be accepting the fiat currency. They can’t even afford to print it all let alone honor it. Only 3% is on actual bills. The rest is really worthless 1′s and 0′s. As you see there’s plenty of real stuff to be concerned about before some fag bands MP3′s! I didn’t even mention the 100,000 depleted uranium babies yet! And that number goes up 200 a day. Get real and try to fight something useful or shut up and put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. The world is on such a precipice encouraging teens suicide almost seems like the right thing to do at this point. It will be far less painful then what is right around the bend!

First, your examples are about the wrongness of copying, but the wrongness of things done with a copy; thats like if someone stabs a person with a kitchen knife, trying to blame the knife.

“Angela Bennett, arrives home to find her house empty and a real-estate agent selling it?” — Making a copy of the deed was not the problem; selling the house (someone else’s property) is the wrong thing, irrespective of whether they made a copy of the deed or not.

“graduate from medical school and get a diploma” — Making a copy of the diploma is not the problem; claiming to be the person named on the diploma and that you have the medical skills is the fraud, irrespective of whether you copied someone else’s diploma or not.

“uses it to go grab some anthrax and drop it into the Lake Mead reservoir” — Making a copy of the passes is not the problem; stealing and releasing the virus is the evil act (irrespective of whether they use your pass or just broke in).

I do understand that, at the moment, the dominant business model for art has been an exchange of collective (government) granted monopoly in return for producing the art, but it hasn’t always been that way.

That is what has you upset, that the model you know for earning an income is threatened by changes. Prior to 18th century there was no such thing as copyright, yet people still produced art. And, once the era of copyright has passed, people will continue to make art.

The most likely form is an alternative collecive agreement between a bunch of people to pay the artist because they want the art, this crowdsourcing facilitated by technology rather than enforced by government statute.